Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

[Speaking for myself of course, not for my current employer, nor
my past Cygnus affliliation, nor in my status as rather depressed
RH stock-owner, nor SC member!]

Joe Buck <jbuck@synopsys.COM> writes:

> I do have concerns (that the world's largest concentration of gcc
> developers will be putting their energy into a fork of gcc, rather than
> the net gcc), but evidently you have decided for business reasons that
> this is the way to go.

I think this is an unfair way of characterizing it.  The work "fork" is
a loaded one, and not appropriate.  I don't see what you would expect
Red Hat to do.  They cannot commit to a non-existent 3.0.x or 3.1.x;
the latter will probably be too late anyway for RH 8, and they need to
start initial test builds RSN.  So they have to work off some release
or snapshot.  They would presumably also add bug-fixes, but they may
not add exactly the same set of bug fixes that correspond to any
particular 3.0.x, because they have a schedule and Gcc has a different
looser schedule.  This is SOP and the same thing everone else does,
not just for Gcc but also the kernel etc.

So I assumme your complaint isn't that RH 8's gcc will not correspond
exactly to any specific Gcc release (which is unavoidable unless they
refuse to apply bug-fixes that appears after the release they use),
but that they are considering using their internal development tree.
Well, they have to use *some* internal development tree, so what is
wrong in using the same one as GNUPro uses, assuming they work to
minimize differences from the FSF tree?

> glibc is a sensitive matter; a number of us got rather nervous to see a
> couple of glibc developers advocating the use of gcc-2.96-rh instead of
> getting the 3.0 problems fixed.

In this case I might be tempted to be more forceful ...
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/per/